A ballot is posted in June for attendees of the current and previous two conferences to determine two of the finalists, and a panel of five judges adds three or more nominees before voting on the overall winner. World Fantasy Award nominees and winners are decided by attendees and judges at the annual World Fantasy Convention. During the ten years they were admissible for that category they won the award seven times and represented 38 of the 56 nominations. The Anthology category has been awarded annually since 1988, though from 1977 through 1987 anthologies were admissible as nominees in the Collection category. An anthology can have any number of editors, and works in the anthology may have been previously published awards are also given out for collections of works by a single author in the Collection category. The World Fantasy Award-Anthology is given each year for anthologies of fantasy stories by multiple authors published in English.

The awards have been described by book critics such as The Guardian as a 'prestigious fantasy prize', and one of the three most prestigious speculative fiction awards, along with the Hugo and Nebula Awards (which cover both fantasy and science fiction). The World Fantasy Awards are given each year by the World Fantasy Convention for the best fantasy fiction published in English during the previous calendar year. The best anthology of fantasy stories by multiple authors published in English in the prior calendar yearĪnn and Jeff VanderMeer ( The Big Book of Modern Fantasy) Literary award for science fiction or fantasy anthologies in English World Fantasy Award-Anthology

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